Title Not Found

It's hard enough to transition from considering starting a blog, to accepting you have a reason to start a blog, to realizing you've been talking about starting a blog to an extent that makes it sound kind of obnoxious every time you consider bringing it up in conversation... yet again.

I've always felt that I can express more strongly into writing whatever it is that I'm feeling or thinking. Sometimes a little bit too strongly, to the point that I look back on some of my poetry and short stories from middle and high school and think "Was it that bad?"  In the hopes of finding my own voice, as an educator, person of color, woman, and member of a vastly changing society, I have decided to embark on this purposeful journey. My hopes for this blog is to create a space where I can speak honestly to myself and hopefully invoke dialogue among others like-mind, opposite-minded, or simply open-minded. 

To start, I'd like to ask "Who am I?"

I struggle to answer this question confidently and without hesitation. I wonder how much of this challenge has to do with the idea that everything I feel I am exists in such cognitive dissonance with each other. 

I can start to break this notion down by talking about the part of me that speaks to the room before I ever have anything to say.

After graduating high school, I felt this sudden burden/responsibility to act as a representative a part of myself that I had no control over. When I entered university, my position as a person of color became ever more apparent to me, especially having grown up in a predominantly Latino community. The color of my skin, and the origin of my heritage didn't hold up much significance at all when I graduated at the top of my class in high school and being one of few in my community to go on to attend a 4-year university. I hadn't given it a second thought, mostly because nearly everyone else in the classrooms I was in had a skin pgiment in the same color range, had parents that cooked and ate similar foods as me, and had gone through a common experience of struggling to maintain a fluent-enough level of Spanish while trying to develop strong academic "smart" English. At some point, however sudden, my ethnicity became one of the loudest elements of my experience as a student and research assistant at a major public research university. Navigating and negotiating the reasons for this realization is still something I'm trying to work through today. 

There are many elements of life that I find myself still trying to navigate, negotiate and make sense of. As a classic over-thinker, introvert, and Socratic enthusiast, there is much still I have to learn and say about my experiences as myself. Whoever that person may be, the title is yet to be found.